About sports; you are right (including Nascar, F1 & WRC).
But we've rarely seen a racing franchise getting the COD/yearly treatment. Only NFS has been milked to death.
And by that, I didn't mean it was a bad franchise, au contraire, it's actually surprisingly steady in terms of quality.
Nintendo got away with it? Well, certainly not in my opinion.
Except for their console designs, they've been quite predictable since the N64 days.